Selecting the location

Resources to help with this and checks and guideline

One of the first steps in planning your flying is selecting appropriate locations for you to go off and fly in.

There are various sources you can call upon to help with his activity.

The first one is going to be your personal target list.

If you haven’t started creating this already I highly recommend that you do so.

Whenever I’m travelling around I’m always noting down places that look of interest to go off and fly in.

I try to note down what the GPL coordinates are for where I actually am and also any potential hazards that I might see in the area such as large antenna and communication masts.

Additionally I’ll try to look for the potential launch and landing spots that might be viable places to start the flight.

Other great sources of information and these are getting better and better by the day a community forums.

So there are four here going to briefly talk about there are links to these that are in the notes section of this lecture.

So the first is called drones to gramme drones to ground is very like the second which is called travel by drone.

Both of these allow users to upload video footage and photographs of where they have been flying with their drones.

They’ve both got maps on them as well.

You can drill down into the maps and you can get some idea for where people were actually doing that flying in and not 100 percent reliable.

Sometimes where people say they have been taking the shots and what the footage actually looks like it’s clearly not the same place that they could turn up some potential sources of flying.

As well as those two.

There’s a new app that’s in launch recently called RC fly maps.

And this has been designed specifically for this purpose to help you find flying locations.

It has lots of user data that the users themselves are uploading it into the app and they’re pointing out places on the map that they recommend that you could fly in.

Interestingly they’re also pointing out places that they recommend that you shouldn’t fly in potentially as they’ve tried to fly there and found that there might have been lots of interference or some other issues in the area.

Also some of this information up there has the restricted air space information on the maps not totally sure how reliable that is.

And it’s going to be mainly U.S. focus at the moment.

That’s a fantastic thing to want to have on there because any flying location you’re going to you of course need to be checking to make sure it’s not in a no fly zone.

The best resource that I’ve come across however is called Fly treks and fly treks make this machine that’s a data logger that you can attach to your drone.

And when you’re flying around at will record the exact coordinates that you’re flying on height speed distance that kind of stuff.

And then people upload it to the fly treks website.

You can go off and explore that Web site and find out where people have been flying as well as this great map view.

So you’ve got some idea across the world where people have been flying.

If you click on explore I’ll go to the actual website now to briefly show you that you’ll come up on the list of individual flights that people have been making recently.

And you can search for these by country so you can find your local area and then you can drill down into any one of these flights.

So I’ve got I have to click on here a little bit the time to upload but then it goes down into the individual

flight details itself where it will tell you the maximum distance people when all this kind of data you’ve got here.

But most importantly it’s got a map and you can zoom in and out this map to find out the launch in flying spots that people be flying in and those launch spots are particularly valuable.

Is it could take you ages to try to find a decent launch spot even though you’ve already identified a good target.

So that is a fantastic resource for you to go to.

Another great source of course is going to be Google Earth and Google Maps.

I use these all the time even if you’ve actually found a location through some other source.

You ought to be going into Google Earth to do some due diligence to make sure that there aren’t going to be any hazards there or other issues.

And Google Earth will help indicate that for you.

So you don’t waste your time by travelling to a flying site and finding out that there is actually just nowhere to launch your land from.

So that’s a key point.

Once you’ve actually decided where you might get to go off and fly you’ve got to do that due diligence and start checking out some of the details about the fly sight key thing you’re going to be doing is distance planning.

So you can find a potential location you think you’re going to launch from.

You’re going to find a potential target that you want to fly to and then using Google Earth.

You can draw a line from one to the other.

It will tell you how far that distance is.

You can then decide whether your drone is capable of flying that far.

And also whether it meets any potential legal restrictions that might be in your country for the distance you are allowed to be flying your drone the distance planning is one of the first things you should be doing when you’re checking out a fly site as well as that.

You also want to be checking out where any local aircraft might be flying so airports landing strips helipad that sort of stuff.

Again using the distance tool in Google Earth you can check to make sure that you’re going to be well well away from those.

So as well as distance and airports and local air traffic and the any no fly zones in the area you can also be looking out for any of your sources of interference.

So this is radio interference that may be blocking your control signal or blocking any video signal you might be having coming back from your drone the kind of sources you can look for on a map.

All these things like telecom towers that are sometimes you can see on the map on the on the satellite view.

Also it’s going to be things like factories hospitals schools big urban areas places you shouldn’t be flying anywhere near anyway.

But despite that those places can have a lot of wife and radio signals that can interfere even if they’re quite a long way away from you too its It’s good to better identify those on the map beforehand give you some pre warning for the weather may actually be some trouble.

So.

In future lectures I’m also going to dive into Google Earth and I’m going to give you a demo of how I explore a brand new fly site a place that I’ve never actually been to before and the kind of things that I look for once I’m actually exploring that on Google Earth.